Henry D. Thoreau 22

Henry D. Thoreau 22

This earliest of his volumes, like most of his writings, is a record

of his friendships, and in it we find that high-toned, paradoxical

essay on Love and Friendship, which has already been quoted. To

read this literally, as Channing says, "would be to accuse him of

stupidity; he gossips there of a high, imaginary world." But its tone

is no higher than was the habitual feeling of Thoreau towards his

friends, or that sentiment which he inspired in them. In Mr. Alcott's

diary for March 16, 1847, he writes, two years before the "Week" was

made public:--

 

"This evening I pass with Thoreau at his hermitage on

Walden, and he reads me some passages from his manuscript

volume, entitled 'A Week on the Concord and Merrimac

Rivers.' The book is purely American, fragrant with the

life of New England woods and streams, and could have

been written nowhere else. Especially am I touched by his

sufficiency and soundness, his aboriginal vigor,--as if a

man had once more come into Nature who knew what Nature

meant him to do with her,--Virgil, and White of Selborne,

and Izaak Walton, and Yankee settler all in one. I came

home at midnight, through the woody snow-paths, and slept

with the pleasing dream that presently the press would

give me two books to be proud of--Emerson's 'Poems,' and

Thoreau's 'Week.'"

 

This high anticipation of the young author's career was fully shared

by Emerson himself, who everywhere praised the genius of Thoreau; and

when in England in 1848, listened readily to a proposition from Dr.

Chapman the publisher, for a new magazine to be called "The Atlantic,"

and printed at the same time in London and in Boston, whose chief

contributors in England should be Froude, Garth Wilkinson, Arthur Hugh

Clough, and perhaps Carlyle; and in New England, Emerson, Thoreau,

Alcott, the Channings, Theodore Parker, and Elliott Cabot. The plan

came to nothing, but it may have been some reminiscence of it which,

nine years afterward, gave its name to that Boston magazine, the

"Atlantic Monthly." Mr. Emerson's letter was dated in London, April

20, 1848, and said:--

 

"I find Chapman very anxious to publish a journal common

to Old and New England, as was long ago proposed. Froude

and Clough and other Oxonians would gladly conspire. Let

the 'Massachusetts Quarterly' give place to this, and we

should have two legs, and bestride the sea. Here I know so

many good-minded people that I am sure will gladly combine.

But what do I, or does any friend of mine in America care

for a journal? Not enough, I fear, to secure an energetic

work on that side. I have a letter from Cabot lately and do

write him to-day. 'Tis certain the Massachusetts 'Quarterly

Review' will fail, unless Henry Thoreau, and Alcott, and

Channing and Newcome, the fourfold visages, fly to the

rescue. I am sorry that Alcott's editor, the Dumont of our

Bentham, the Baruch of our Jeremiah, is so slow to be born."

 

In 1846, before Mr. Emerson went abroad, we find Thoreau (whose own

hut beside Walden had been built and inhabited for a year) sketching

a design for a lodge which Mr. Emerson then proposed to build on

the opposite shore. It was to be a retreat for study and writing,

at the summit of a ledge, with a commanding prospect over the level

country, towards Monadnoc and Wachusett in the west and northwest. For

this lookout Mr. Alcott added a story to Thoreau's sketch; but the

hermitage was never built, and the plan finally resulted in a rustic

summer-house, erected by Alcott with some aid from Thoreau, in Mr.

Emerson's garden, in 1847-48.[9]

 

Humbler friends than poets and philosophers sometimes shared the

companionship of these brethren in Concord. In February, 1847, Mr.

Alcott, who was then a woodman, laboring on his hillside with his own

axe, where afterwards Hawthorne wandered and mused, thus notes in his

diary an incident not unusual in the town:--

 

"Our friend the fugitive, who has shared now a week's

hospitalities with us (sawing and piling my wood), feels

this new trust of Freedom yet unsafe here in New England,

and so has left us this morning for Canada. We supplied him

with the means of journeying, and bade him Godspeed to a

freer land. His stay with us has given image and a name to

the dire entity of slavery."

 

It was this slave, no doubt, who had lodged for a while in Thoreau's

Walden hut.

 

My own acquaintance with Thoreau did not begin with our common

hostility to slavery, which afterwards brought us most closely

together, but sprang from the accident of my editing for a few weeks

the "Harvard Magazine," a college monthly, in 1854-55, in which

appeared a long review of "Walden" and the "Week." In acknowledgment

of this review, which was laudatory and made many quotations from

his two volumes, Thoreau, whom I had never seen, called at my room

in Holworthy Hall, Cambridge, in January, 1855, and left there in

my absence, a copy of the "Week" with a message implying it was for

the writer of the magazine article. It so happened that I was in the

College Library when Thoreau was calling on me, and when he came,

directly after, to the Library, some one present pointed him out to me

as the author of "Walden." I was then a senior in college, and soon to

go on my winter vacation; in course of which I wrote to Thoreau from

my native town, as follows:--

 

"HAMPTON FALLS, N. H., _Jan'y_ 30th, '55.

 

"MY DEAR SIR,--I have had it in mind to write you a letter

ever since the day when you visited me, without my knowing

it, at Cambridge. I saw you afterward at the Library, but

refrained from introducing myself to you, in the hope that

I should see you later in the day. But as I did not, will

you allow me to seek you out, when next I come to Concord?

 

"The author of the criticism in the 'Harvard Magazine' is

Mr. Morton of Plymouth, a friend and pupil of your friend,

Marston Watson, of that old town. Accordingly I gave him

the book which you left with me, judging that it belonged

to him. He received it with delight, as a gift of value in

itself, and the more valuable for the sake of the giver.

 

"We who at Cambridge look toward Concord as a sort of Mecca

for our pilgrimages, are glad to see that your last book

finds such favor with the public. It has made its way where

your name has rarely been heard before, and the inquiry,

'Who is Mr. Thoreau?' proves that the book has in part done

its work. For my own part, I thank you for the new light it

shows me the aspects of Nature in, and for the marvelous

beauty of your descriptions. At the same time, if any one

should ask me what I think of your philosophy, I should be

apt to answer that it is not worth a straw. Whenever again

you visit Cambridge, be assured, sir, that it would give me

much pleasure to see you at my room. There, or in Concord,

I hope soon to see you; if I may intrude so much on your

time.

 

"Believe me always, yours very truly,

 

"F. B. SANBORN."

 

This note, which I had entirely forgotten, and of which I trust my

friend soon forgave the pertness, came to me recently among his

papers; with one exception, it is the only letter that passed between

us, I think, in an acquaintance of more than seven years. Some six

weeks after its date, I went to live in Concord, and happened to take

rooms in Mr. Channing's house, just across the way from Thoreau's.

I met him more than once in March, 1855, but he did not call on my

sister and me until the 11th of April, when I made the following brief

note of his appearance:--

 

"To-night we had a call from Mr. Thoreau, who came at eight

and stayed till ten. He talked about Latin and Greek--which

he thought ought to be studied--and about other things. In

his tones and gestures he seemed to me to imitate Emerson,

so that it was annoying to listen to him, though he said

many good things. He looks like Emerson, too,--coarser,

but with something of that serenity and sagacity which E.

has. Thoreau looks eminently _sagacious_--like a sort of

wise, wild beast. He dresses plainly, wears a beard in his

throat, and has a brown complexion."

 

A month or two later my diary expanded this sketch a little, with

other particulars:--

 

"He is a little under size, with a huge Emersonian nose,

bluish gray eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy weather-beaten

face, which reminds me of some shrewd and honest

animal's--some retired philosophical woodchuck or

magnanimous fox. He dresses very plainly, wears his collar

turned over like Mr. Emerson" [we young collegians then

wearing ours upright], "and often an old dress-coat, broad

in the skirts, and by no means a fit. He walks about with a

brisk, rustic air, and never seems tired."

 

Notwithstanding the slow admiration that these trivial comments

indicated, our friendship grew apace, and for two years or more I

dined with him almost daily, and often joined in his walks and river

voyages, or swam with him in some of our numerous Concord waters. In

1857 I introduced John Brown to him, then a guest at my house; and in

1859, the evening before Brown's last birthday, we listened together

to the old captain's last speech in the Concord Town Hall. The events

of that year and the next brought us closely together, and I found him

the stanchest of friends.

 

This chapter might easily be extended into a volume, so long was the

list of his companions, and so intimate and perfect his relation with

them, at least on his own side.

 

"A truth-speaker he," said Emerson at his funeral, "capable

of the most deep and strict conversation; a physician to

the wounds of any soul; a friend, knowing not only the

secret of friendship, but almost worshipped by those few

persons who resorted to him as their confessor and prophet,

and knew the deep value of his mind and great heart. His

soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short

life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever

there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever

there is beauty, he will find a home."

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VIII.

 

THE WALDEN HERMITAGE.

 

 

It is by his two years' encampment on the shore of a small lake in

the Walden woods, a mile south of Concord village, that Thoreau is

best known to the world; and the book which relates how he lived and

what he saw there is still, as it always was, the most popular of his

writings. Like all his books, it contains much that might as well have

been written on any other subject; but it also describes charmingly

the scenes and events of his sylvan life,--his days and nights with

Nature. He spent two years and a half in this retreat, though often

coming forth from it. The localities of Concord which Thoreau immortalized were chiefly

those in the neighborhood of some lake or stream,--though it would be

hard to find in that well-watered town, especially in springtime, any

place which is not neighbor either to the nine-times circling river Musketaquid, to the swifter Assabet,